We’re down to 99 titles.  I’m leaving it up to all of you faithful readers to choose the next few books.  Post a comment with the one you want me to read.  As a reward, I’ll send you a different book from my closet of goodies.

Biography

• Roald Dahl, Boy
• Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun
• Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man
• Dylan Thomas, Dylan Thomas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
• Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies
• Janet Wallach, Desert Queen
• Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
• Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

Classics (published before 1900)

• Charlotte Bronte, Villette
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
• Kenneth Mackay, The Yellow Wave
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne
• Mark Twain, The American Claimant & Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Contemporary Fiction

• Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
• Nick Hornby, About a Boy
• Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
• Billie Letts, The Honk and Holler Opening Soon
• Ann B. Ross, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
• Anita Shreve, The Pilot’s Wife
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Fantasy

• Ilona Andrews, On the Edge
• Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
• Caroline B. Cooney, Goddess of Yesterday
• Mary Gentle, Rats and Gargoyles
• Jessica Day George, Princess of the Midnight Ball
• Simon R. Green, Drinking Midnight Wine
• Morgan Howell, King’s Property
• Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun
• Ian R. MacLeod, The Light Ages
• Justin Richards, The Death Collector

Historical Fiction

• David Benioff, City of Thieves
• Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders
• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
• Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
• Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List
• Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
• Colleen McCullough, Morgan’s Run
• Celia Rees, Pirates!
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood

Modern Classics (published between 1900 and 1950)

• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg  Ohio
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• E. M. Forster, Howards End
• James Hilton, Lost Horizon
• Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
• Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Nonfiction

• Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose
• Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
• Walter Lord, A Night to Remember
• David McCullough, 1776
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Dan Rockmore, Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis
• Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans

Science Fiction

• David Brin, Kiln People
• L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall
• George Alec Effinger, Death in Florence
• Brian Falkner, The Tomorrow Code
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
• Ann Halam, Siberia
• Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat
• Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
• Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Retrieval Artist
• Charles Stross, Glasshouse

Young Adult/Juvenile

• Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
• Alane Ferguson, The Christopher Killer
• E. L. Konigsburg, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
• Iain Lawrence, Ghost Boy
• David Lubar, Dunk
• Paula Morris, Ruined
• Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
• Virginia Euwer Wolff, Make Lemonade

Books People Nag Me About Reading

• Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen
• Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men
• Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• Sherwood Smith, Inda
• John Steakley, Armor
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Books I Bought New, Intending to Read Immediately, But Never Did

• Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Horizon
• Ally Carter, Heist Society
• Kristin Cashore, Fire
• Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness
• Julia Reed, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena
• Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
• Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
• Neal Stephenson, Anathem
• Connie Willis, All Clear

There are, as of today, 4292 books in my house.  3669 of those belong to Greystoke and me (as opposed to belonging to the children or waiting to find a good home with the right person).  And it turns out I haven’t read 1285 of them.  That’s 35% of the books I own and 30% of the total–or, in other words, way too many.

Hence, the project.  I’ve picked 11 books in each of 11 different categories and set a goal to finish them by Armistice Day, 11/11/11.  (I know it’s Veteran’s Day now.  This just sounds cooler.)  Aside from this, the only other rules are:

1. I have to own the books I’m reading, and
2. No more than one book by any one author.

I also decided to use a random number generator to choose a reading order because I liked the idea of not knowing in advance what I’d be reading next.

I’m posting this publicly not because I want to brag about my extensive reading (because I know people who read far more than this in a year without breaking a sweat) but because I figure I have a better chance of actually finishing if I make it public.  It turned out to be exceptionally hard to narrow the list down to 121 books, but here they are, listed by category:

Biography

• Peter S. Beagle, I See By My Outfit
• Roald Dahl, Boy
• Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette
• Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun
• Graham McCann, Cary Grant
• Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man
• Dylan Thomas, Dylan Thomas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
• Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies
• Janet Wallach, Desert Queen
• Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
• Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

Classics (published before 1900)

• Charlotte Bronte, Villette
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
• Kenneth Mackay, The Yellow Wave
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne
• Mark Twain, The American Claimant & Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Contemporary Fiction

• Tracy Chevalier, The Virgin Blue
• Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
• Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
• Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog
• Nick Hornby, About a Boy
• Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
• Billie Letts, The Honk and Holler Opening Soon
• Ann B. Ross, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
• Anita Shreve, The Pilot’s Wife
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Fantasy

• Ilona Andrews, On the Edge
• Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
• Steven Brust, To Reign in Hell
• Caroline B. Cooney, Goddess of Yesterday
• Mary Gentle, Rats and Gargoyles
• Jessica Day George, Princess of the Midnight Ball
• Simon R. Green, Drinking Midnight Wine
• Morgan Howell, King’s Property
• Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun
• Ian R. MacLeod, The Light Ages
• Justin Richards, The Death Collector

Historical Fiction

• David Benioff, City of Thieves
• Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders
• L. M. Elliott, Under a War-Torn Sky
• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
• Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
• Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List
• Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
• Colleen McCullough, Morgan’s Run
• Celia Rees, Pirates!
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood

Modern Classics (published between 1900 and 1950)

• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg  Ohio
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• E. M. Forster, Howards End
• James Hilton, Lost Horizon
• Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
• Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Nonfiction

• Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
• Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
• Walter Lord, A Night to Remember
• David McCullough, 1776
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
• David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino
• Dan Rockmore, Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis
• David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
• Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans

Science Fiction

• David Brin, Kiln People
• L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall
• George Alec Effinger, Death in Florence
• Brian Falkner, The Tomorrow Code
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
• Ann Halam, Siberia
• Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat
• Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Retrieval Artist
• Dan Simmons, Hyperion
• George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
• Charles Stross, Glasshouse

Young Adult/Juvenile

• Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
• Alane Ferguson, The Christopher Killer
• Victoria Forester, The Girl Who Could Fly
• E. L. Konigsburg, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
• Gordon Korman, Son of the Mob
• Iain Lawrence, Ghost Boy
• David Lubar, Dunk
• Paula Morris, Ruined
• Will Shetterly, Dogland
• Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped
• Virginia Euwer Wolff, Make Lemonade

Books People Nag Me About Reading

• Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen
• Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men
• Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
• Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars
• Sherwood Smith, Inda
• John Steakley, Armor
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Books I Bought New, Intending to Read Immediately, But Never Did

• Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Horizon
• Ally Carter, Heist Society
• Kristin Cashore, Fire
• Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness
• Julia Reed, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena
• Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
• Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
• Neal Stephenson, Anathem
• Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings
• Carrie Vaughn, Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand
• Connie Willis, All Clear

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations!  I’ll be posting more about the individual books through the year…and with any luck, they’ll all be wonderful.

I am, as I’ve hinted before, a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.  The natural result of this is that I’m enthusiastic about them when they come up in conversation.  (Okay, it’s not that I just refer to them out of the blue, but if we’re talking about, say, how clowns are scary, that leads naturally to the Ankh-Morpork Fools’ Guild.  Or Pennywise the clown, but he scares me.)  No, I’m not the kind of enthusiastic that has people checking their watches or looking for the nearest exit.  Probably.  It’s just that sometimes, when people talk about things they love, it makes you interested to know more.  That kind of enthusiastic.

So I have often had people ask me which Discworld novel to start with.  “Jane,” they say, “we don’t know where to start.  There are 37 books in the series and that is long even for those of us who have been patiently waiting for all 58 volumes of The Wheel of Time.  Please give us the benefit of your vast knowledge of all things bookish.”

(What they really say is, “So this Pratchett guy is good, huh?  Just give me a book and back away slowly.  Incidentally, did you know you’re foaming at the mouth again?”)

[more]

Ahem.  The point is that Discworld reading order is something even fans who have read the whole series multiple times can argue about.  Partly this is because the Discworld novels can be grouped according to protagonist; partly it’s because Pratchett’s writing style, like any good author’s, has evolved over time.  However, these discussions between fans aren’t necessarily helpful to a new Discworld initiate reader.  When you’re deciding which Discworld novel to start with, it’s more important to choose based on what kind of experience you’re after than on some predefined ideal.

In this post I’m going to set out a number of possible reading orders, in hope that those of you who are new to the Discworld series will find one that appeals to you.  Almost all Discworld novels are available in your local bookstore or library.  (And, of course, Amazon.com, which sells everything.)  No matter where you choose to start, you’ll be able to find the right book.

(Rather than link to each title every time I’ve mentioned it, I’ve put the Wikipedia entry for Pratchett’s bibliography here.  Just click on an individual title to read more about it.  I can’t guarantee that this site contains no spoilers, but if you stick to just the synopsis at the beginning of each entry, you should be fine.)

Order #1: Modified Sub-Series

This is the order I personally prefer.  The advantage is that you have some flexibility in where to start, and you only have five to seven books in a series, which isn’t quite so overwhelming.  The disadvantage is that it’s easy to overlook the books that aren’t part of a sub-series (although I’ve seen lists that create groups for those as well).  Also, if you really enjoy a particular sub-series, you may be dissatisfied with some of the others simply because they’re not that one favorite.  Even so, I think this method is a good introduction to Discworld, particularly if you don’t feel inclined to tackle 37 books at once.

The reason it’s modified is that the very early Pratchett books are very different in tone and content from even the middle novels, let alone the more recent ones. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic in particular represent a different sort of experiment, in which Pratchett was experimenting heavily with parody and the Discworld was simply a background through which the main characters traveled from one subplot to the next.  The books in parentheses can safely be skipped without ruining the reading experience.  If you do choose to read them, all I ask is that if you don’t like them, please give the next one in the series a chance.

Order #2: Strict Chronological

This reading order—chronological by publication date—is best for people who want to see how the Discworld and Pratchett’s writing style changed over time.  The disadvantage is, as noted above, that the very early novels bear little resemblance to the later ones.  I recommend this method for people who may have read one or two other Pratchett novels at random and already know they like the series.  There is some valuable plot information in the early books that’s better for having seen it first-hand, even though all of it is given out in later books as well.

Order #3: Truncated Chronological

This order arises from some discussions I had with friends on the Diana Wynne Jones email list a while back.  We were talking about how there are places within the chronology where Pratchett’s writing style and novel structure passes some kind of hurdle, making one book markedly different (and improved) from the previous one.  I said there were two places like that; others called for three or more; in any case, it was quite revelatory as to how people perceived the Discworld novels based on where they came in to the series.

Using the above chronology and starting with Reaper Man means passing over most of the overt parody and broad humor of the earlier novels.  At this point Pratchett had established enough material about the Discworld that he could tell stories that referred to his own creation rather than using it as a backdrop for retelling or satirizing other people’s stories.  Reaper Man is also one of the most moving of the novels while retaining the sense of the ridiculous that makes Discworld novels what they are.

If you move a bit further down the list, it’s harder to pick a solid breaking point, but I’d probably go with Feet of Clay (and not just because it’s my favorite).  After Reaper Man, the novels gradually gain a kind of solidity that comes when a book is About Something more than just a story.  At the same time, they’re still enormously funny—which is, I think, the marvel; you don’t really notice the ethical underpinnings as you’re reading.  This movement culminates in Feet of Clay, where you just can’t help realizing that this is a brilliant story about freedom and humanity.  The novels from that point definitely continue this trend.

Finally, you can skip straight to Night Watch, which is the first book in the series that is not intrinsically funny.  Lots of funny moments, sure, but the core of the plot is deadly serious.  After this point, the humor is delivered more in dialogue, character interaction, and situational humor than in a ridiculous plot.  Starting here will give you a very different idea of what the Discworld novels are really about.

If you’re at all interested in giving the Discworld series a try, pick one of these methods and jump right in.  The truth is that anywhere you start is fine; on some level, they’re all stand-alone novels.  Read.  Enjoy.  Come back here and talk about it.  You’re always welcome.

There are a lot of books published in the United States every year. Bowker’s report for 2008 (these are the people who assign ISBN tracking numbers to publishers in the US) shows over 275,000 books published in 2008—the report says this is a projected number, but it matches other informal sources I’ve seen and draws from the very reliable Books In Print. Let’s take the numbers in this report as accurate for the sake of argument and play with them. The number of new adult fiction books published in 2008 is down a bit from last year, but on average it’s 50,000 over the last two years, which is a good round number and I’m comfortable projecting it for 2009 as well. Now let’s apply Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 90% of everything is a waste of time. Assuming Sturgeon is exactly right, this leaves us with 5,000 new books worth reading each year. Five THOUSAND new titles, and I haven’t even touched on English-language fiction from other countries or any number of excellent non-fiction books. You’d have to read 13.7 books every day of the year in order to read them all—an insane number. Suppose further that these five thousand books are divided evenly between, I don’t know, ten major genres of fiction. (I did mention I liked round numbers.) This is completely untrue, but it makes for a good illustration. Reading 500 books in your favorite genre works out to about 1 1/3 books per day—less insane, but still not likely for most people, and it assumes you only like one type of fiction. Multiply that 1.37 by the number of genres you love, and it’s totally impractical. Add to that all the great books published in earlier years that you haven’t read yet, and we’re looking at the rubber room again.

You see why, with apologies to Upton Sinclair, I refer to the great and wonderful world of published fiction as “the jungle.” Once we get past the well-mapped territory of favorite authors and series, we are surrounded by hundreds, thousands of potentially delightful books, but with limited tools for choosing among them. What do I like? Why do I like it? How can I tell if a book will really interest me, even if all my friends are raving about it? If I like a book that the New York Times Review of Books panned, which of us is right (and is that even the correct question to ask)?

I am not the best guide through this jungle. I read many, many books every year, but it’s still only a small fraction of what’s out there. In a way, I’m still mapping the jungle myself. But I love finding books for people. I love finding the perfect match for someone—something even they didn’t know they would enjoy. And I love to talk about what I read—not just about the story and characters, but why and how a book works for me, and what makes it objectively good rather than personally enjoyable or vice versa. I’m writing here about what I read not only for myself, but for anyone else who is traveling the jungle looking for a book to love. Welcome to the safari.